Bridge Magazine/Detroit Journalism Cooperative

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Editor’s note: The Detroit Free Press’ A Better Michigan section often features work by Bridge Magazine, which is produced by the Center for Michigan. But today’s Bridge piece deserves an introduction. Bridge is part of the newly founded Detroit Journalism Cooperative. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the cooperative also consists of Michigan Radio, 101.9 WDET-FM, Detroit Public Television and New Michigan Media. The cooperative’s mission is to deepen the public’s understanding of Detroit’s restructuring and engage residents in its revitalization. Many of these groups are already partners in A Better Michigan, and we are happy to feature their work online at ABetterMichigan.com and in our print section in the Detroit Free Press. Today’s inaugural installment features Bridge’s dashboard for Detroit, which tracks services and some of the intangibles that will make Detroit a desirable place to live. Below is an abridged version of Bridge’s first report as part of the cooperative. Learn more about the project from Bridge Magazine editor David Zeman and read the full series of stories at Bridge Magazine’s site.

Detroit is a city of superlatives and, these days, they’re not good ones: most dangerous. Lowest incomes. Highest poverty. Biggest exodus. Worst schools. And last year, it became the largest U.S. city to go bust. Ever.

Regardless of which moves Gov. Rick Snyder and emergency manager Kevyn Orr make, they will require pain. It will be felt acutely and most publicly by those closest to a city pay stub or pension check. They’re already facing steep cuts in health care, and pensions will most likely be cut. But make no mistake: the city’s recovery will tax the patience and daily lives of its 700,000 residents and the companies that do business in Detroit, in one way or another. That pain will only be worth it if substantive, positive and measurable steps are taken.

With that in mind, Bridge Magazine, and its partners in the newly created Detroit Journalism Cooperative, are working together to monitor and analyze these efforts. This project will highlight the challenge and the promise of Detroit’s future. We will acknowledge when progress is made, and note when the city slips backward. We will hold public officials to their ambitions, and examine whether the pains and the gains of Detroit’s recovery are spread fairly.

Today, we start by setting benchmarks of where Detroit stands in early 2014. Later this year, we’ll transform those benchmarks into a dashboard to gauge the city’s progress on measures large and small, obvious and more ephemeral.

For many, the portrait painted here will be familiar, a collection of headlines from the past. For others, the scale may surprise. For instance, if Detroit cut its murder rate in half, it’d still be No. 8 in the country. If its housing vacancy rate (at 30% in 2012) equaled the second-worst city, hurricane ravaged New Orleans (24.1%), Detroit would have 24,000 more occupied homes – or more homes than the entire Downriver community of Taylor.

And Detroit’s median household income – the lowest among the nation’s largest cities, at $23,600 – is a full 30% below the 10th-lowest city, Toledo, at $31,600.

These numbers don’t discount the concrete gains roaring across pockets of the city.

But if the city can address its most vexing problems, it could be rewarded with many residents who decide to stay put, and an army of expatriates ready to join the young professionals who are driving up rents for downtown lofts and apartments and bringing new vitality to Detroit.

“My friends and I, they all say they love it,” said Tiandra Hodge, a 1999 Cass Tech grad who has returned to Detroit after living in Washington and Miami. “They say they wish they could come back.”

Before that wave arrives, Hodge said she knows the city must begin to deliver the kind of reliable basic services that residents take for granted in places like Southfield and Dearborn, Chicago and Atlanta. Friends profess their love of Detroit, Hodge said, but they still ask about the high crime and failing schools.

Hodge grew up in Rosedale Park and knows that its residents worry about crime and job opportunities. But they also are proud and want to have a voice in whatever direction the city takes. It cannot just be about the young who are coming into the city. It has to be about those already here.

“I think they just want to know they are factored into the new Detroit,” Hodge said.

Lights, blight and transportation

It was a big promise.

The day Mike Duggan was publicly sworn in as mayor, he asked that any resident who was thinking about moving out to give the city six months to make tangible improvements to the historically poor delivery of services to Detroiters.

With limited power while the city is under a state-appointed emergency manager, Duggan promised to improve three key services that have long plagued residents: working street lights, blight, and bus service.

The promise was as bold as the problems are imposing:

■ 40% of Detroit street lights don’t work

■ 40% of city buses are broken

■ 78,000 vacant structures litter the city

■ There are another 66,000 blighted and vacant lots

If any of the struggling service areas is capable of a quick, visible fix, it’s busing. In his first six months in office, Duggan pledged to train and install a transit police force, outfit buses with cameras and ensure that a full service of 225 buses will be on the road, with plenty of others in reserve.

In the long run, some say revolutionary change is needed. “The city needs to get out of the business of transportation; the city can’t afford it,” said Fred Westbrook, president and business agent for the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 26, which represents the city’s estimated 570 bus drivers.

Westbrook is among those who suggest a regional transit authority that would provide a bus system as sophisticated as those in other large cities, with additional routes from Detroit to Metro Airport, the University of Michigan, Pontiac and Lansing. Such a system also would include the $176-million, 3.3-mile M-1 Rail Streetcar Project that will run along Woodward from downtown to the North End. M-1 streetcars are scheduled to hit the road in 2016.

Detroiter Stephen Boyle, 53, said he wants Duggan to attack the bus crisis first. “Mobility is a human right. If humans cannot move, they die – economically, physically and mentally,” he said.

Boyle offered his own challenge to Duggan – a test of whether the mayor’s promise to make improvements becomes reality.

“Six months from now, he shouldn’t be afraid to take the bus without security,” Boyle said. “That will tell me whether things are running better.”

How to attract jobs?

Coleman Young often talked about the importance of jobs in restoring Detroit’s economic fortunes and alleviating crime after becoming the city’s first African-American mayor in 1974.

But Young, who died in 1997, never saw those jobs materialize. Even before he was first elected 40 years ago, and through a series of Young’s successors, Detroit has bled jobs and residents, contributing to falling revenues and the city’s slide into bankruptcy.

Now it’s up to newly elected Mayor Mike Duggan, in concert with business, community and state leaders, to bring jobs to a city that desperately needs them to remain viable.

Creating job opportunities could be as daunting a challenge for Duggan as it was for Young 40 years ago.

“The question is; where are those jobs going to come from? What jobs are Detroit residents prepared to take?” said demographer Kurt Metzger, who recently retired as director of Data Driven Detroit and now serves as mayor of Pleasant Ridge, in suburban Oakland County.

Detroit’s unemployment rate in November was 15.1%, nearly double the jobless rate for the entire metro area. The unemployment rate is roughly 40% for young Detroiters between the ages of 20 and 24. And nearly 23% of city residents lack even a high school education.

Only 30% of Detroit adults consider themselves to be working, the lowest percentage of any large city in the country – and nearly half of those who do have jobs work outside the city, a percentage exceeded in the U.S. only by Las Vegas.

The rate of Detroit residents who work outside of the city might be even higher, but roughly 25% of Detroit households don’t have cars. And a lack of reliable public transportation makes jobs in the suburbs inaccessible to many Detroit residents.

Experts say creating more good jobs in the city will be a difficult because struggling public schools, a workforce that is already poorly educated, a lack of adequate housing and a crime rate that deters businesses and people from locating in Detroit.

Of the new metro Detroit jobs projected in the next decade, more than 4 in 10 are expected to be low-skill, low-paying gigs, such as retail and food service, according to a Bridge analysis of federal jobs data.

New jobs in the downtown area, many of them in technology and skilled health care professions, could help employment spread to other areas of the city, Metzger said. But many of those spinoff jobs would likely be in lower-paid service occupations, unless Detroit can find a way to lift education and job training for residents.

“That’s still the big question mark,” Metzger said. “What do you do with a large percentage of the population that doesn’t have skills and education, and is being left out of the work force?”

Benchmarking livability

Crime, education, unemployment, services – all have a direct bearing on urban life, and all are measurable in data, and trackable over time. But what can be lumped into a category one might call “livability?” The factors that make a city appealing to ordinary residents, workers, families, young people and fun seekers aren’t so easy to quantify.

The community spirit that moves Detroiters to tattoo Old English D’s on their arms manifests in many ways. Block clubs in many neighborhoods look out for one another, mowing vacant lots and sharing barbecue in summer months. The city has a robust core of thousands of volunteers, who staff everything from hospital gift shops to soup kitchens, schools, animal shelters and community gardens.

The city’s cultural jewels run the gamut from ensembles and orchestras to Old Masters and African-American history, and myriad non-institutional artists fill parks and plazas with techno, country, heavy metal and performance art. Touring Broadway shows, community and children’s theater and film societies fill small halls and grand auditoriums. Four major-league sports teams play in the city or suburbs.

Detroit’s parks are another story. Its tattered beauties – which include Belle Isle and Palmer Park – are starting to improve, as nonprofit conservancies take over operation and relieve the city of the financial burden of maintenance. Elsewhere, scores of city parks have been closed, and many other neighborhood and even riverfront parks see little or no maintenance.

Likewise, many community and recreation centers, which once gave teens across this sprawling city a place to go and safe activities to enjoy, have been shuttered for years, with private money helping to keep the few remaining facilities open.

But a lack of basic services – good schools, reliable public transit and trash pick-up, citywide blight removal and working street lights – are ongoing barriers to Detroit becoming a place where residents want to stay and others wish to live and work.

So, too, are high taxes, including property taxes, which Mayor Duggan just pledged would be going down, and the notorious cost of insurance, for both motorists and homeowners, which has led some to such subterfuge as registering their cars outside the city, a topic Bridge explored last year. The state has no hard data on exactly how much more Detroit residents pay, said Caleb Buhs, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services. Anecdotally, Detroiters will claim they often pay twice what they would in the suburbs.

So there is much work ahead to make Detroit more attractive, more livable.

It is incumbent on city leaders – from Mayor Mike Duggan to City Council, Orr, Gov. Rick Snyder, Detroit clergy and other power brokers – to convince scandal-weary residents that they will have a role in Detroit’s recovery. A livable city is one in which ordinary people feel they have a voice in political, economic and social change. That means a real effort to bring transparency and accountability to public service. City government must likewise be more responsive than in the past in providing quick and inexpensive access to public records.

For residents who have endured so much, even more will be asked. Improving Detroit’s quality of life requires engagement in all corners of the city – rebuilding neighborhoods, volunteering, keeping children on track in school and, in the ultimate test of civic duty, voting.

Solving Detroit's crime problem

No problem facing Detroit is more apparent yet baffling than crime and public safety. For decades, the city has owned one of the highest murder rates in the country, its burglaries and auto thefts are blamed for the sky-high insurance rates residents must pay.

But no one has been able to dramatically lessen the problem. Murders may have been down in 2013, but they’re still fantastically high, either the worst or second-worst in the country.

“It’s a major negative deterrent,” said Eric Foster, president of public policy consulting firm Foster, McCollum White and Associates.

Reducing crime is one of the main goals of Orr, who wants to use savings from bankruptcy court to buy new police cars and fire equipment.

A shrinking budget and police retirements resulted in the department losing nearly 500 officers, or 15% of its force, between 2008 and 2012. Over that span, violent crime fell 7%, but murders rose 26%. The city “clears” about 19%of its violent crimes. Other large cities solve 40%, on average.

The travails of Detroit’s fire and emergency medical response have been well documented. Many of the city’s ladder fire trucks are out of service and it took an infusion of private money to shore up the city’s fleet of ambulances.

Reversing these largely budget-driven trends is going to take cash, and lots of it. To get to the police manpower of 30 years ago, Foster calculates the city would have to spend $157 million more a year. That could put a squad car in nearly every one of the city’s square miles, a metric he says will be the only way to get response times down to a respectable level.

If the millions expected to be trimmed from Detroit’s debt bill don’t translate into more police, better fire equipment and more ambulances, Foster said, “then something’s gone horribly wrong.”

Fixing its failing schools

For more than a generation, nobody has been able to improve citywide performance at Detroit’s public schools.

Not the state, which stripped the school board of its authority and has run the Detroit Public Schools district for 12 of the last 15 years. Not the mayor, who the state also stripped of power in 2013, putting the city in the hands of an emergency manager. And not Detroit residents, most of whom now send their children to mediocre or academically struggling charter schools to avoid DPS.

In 2009, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called Detroit “ground zero” for public education, worse than New Orleans, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. That was the year Detroit’s public schools recorded the worst scores in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, known as the Nation’s Report Card. The scores were so low and so far behind the scores of other participating large cities that it seemed as if Detroit’s students had just blindly guessed at the answers. Scores have increased only marginally since.

So after years of reform, Detroit now has three struggling systems – Detroit Public Schools, the state reform district known as the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), and dozens of charter schools.

Improving these schools will be critical to virtually every aspect of Detroit’s recovery – gaining population, attracting new business, and job and revenue gains.

David Arsen, a Michigan State University professor of K-12 educational administration, is among those calling for more money for city schools, noting that it costs more to educate low-income children who generally begin school well behind their more affluent, suburban peers.

Excellent Schools Detroit, a nonprofit, said leaders’ failure to collaborate on education in the city has created an oversupply of underpopulated schools and some neighborhoods lacking a single high-performing school. ESD also recommends that Detroit create a single k-12 transportation system similar to that in Washington, D.C., that would bus students regardless of whether they attend DPS, an EAA school or a charter.

Ultimately, the test of education reform is whether students improve in Detroit classrooms. Are more students finishing high school prepared for college or career? Are more students taking advanced placement tests? Are students who go on to community college or universities actually graduating and landing jobs?